Shakespeare (W.), Plays, 1st edit. The Napier copy, wanting the verses. Folio, London, 1623.
The notation of differences in copies of the same book, even if it is not one of supreme value, is always apt to be useful. Of literary comment the supply is discretionary, so long as it is new, pertinent, and interesting. The transfer to the catalogue of any inedited manuscript matter on the fly-leaves or margins, or of any proprietary marks, is eminently desirable.
For French literature, which is so largely collected in England, the Manuel du Libraire, &c., of Brunet, 7 vols. 8vo, 1860-78, with the works of Cohen and Gay, is the standard authority. The two latter, so far as they go, are more exhaustive than the Manuel, which is nearly as incomplete as our Lowndes, and not much more accurate. A new edition has been mooted; it is a clear desideratum. For value Brunet is scarcely more serviceable than its English analogue, and the book is, curiously enough, particularly unsafe in such a field as the French books of former times, where so much depends on factitious conditions barely intelligible to an ordinary English or American consulter.
Two books which perhaps equally appeal to the English and Continental collectors are those just mentioned: Cohen, Guide de l'Amateur de Livres à Gravures du XVIIIth siècle, 5me ed. 8o, 1886-90, and Gay, Bibliographie des Ouvrages relatifs à l'Amour, aux Femmes, au Mariage, et des Livres Facétieux, 3me ed. 12o, 1871, 6 vols. Both, but especially the first, are essential for guidance in the choice of a class of publication of which the innumerable variations and the artificial prices necessitate the utmost caution on the part of an intending buyer.
There are, in fact, no topics to which an amateur or student can direct his notice or limit himself where he will not have been preceded, so to speak, by a path-finder; nor does the narrowness of the range always ensure brevity or compactness of treatment, since the Schreiber Playing Cards of all Countries and Periods, which to a certain extent enter into the literary category, occupy in the Account by Sir A. W. Franks three folio volumes; but a satisfactory view of the subject is to be gained from the works by Singer and Chatto, 1816-48. As a rule, editors of this class of publication are more modest and compressed. There are the bibliographies on Angling by J. R. Smith and Westwood; on Tobacco, by Bragge (1880); on Dialect books, by J. R. Smith (at present capable of great expansion); on Bewick, by Hugo; on Bartolozzi, by Tuer; on Tokens, by Williamson and by Atkins; on Coins and Medals, by a numerous body of gentlemen specified in a section of the writer's Coin Collector, 1896. In the English and American series are the well-known volumes by Henry Stevens and by Sabin, and the sumptuous catalogue of the early Laws and Statutes by Mr. Charlemagne Tower. In the Chetham Society's series, Mr. Jones, late Chetham's Librarian, printed an elaborate list of all the old English books and tracts relating to Popery.
There are many ways in which compilers of works of reference are in danger of perpetuating mistakes as to books, where they rely on secondary authorities. No account of an old book is, in the first place, entitled to credence unless it has been drawn up by the describer with the book itself before him; and when it is considered that not one individual in ten thousand can even then be trusted to copy what is under his eyes, and that there are, and always have been, those who have thought fit to exercise their ingenuity by falsifying dates and other particulars, there cannot be much room for surprise that our bibliographies, and those of every other people, are partly made up of material which never existed. Errors are heirlooms, of which it is hard to get rid.
The extent to which rare books are multiplied, as regards varieties of impression, by misdescriptions in catalogues, is remarkable and serious, and the bibliographer is not unfrequently confronted with statements of his ignorance of copies in sales of which he has not thought it worth while to indicate the true facts. But it is our individual experience that it is impossible to be too minute in pointing out snares for the unwary, and indeed for all who work at second-hand.
The Club or Society for the communication to members, and through them to the public generally, of literary and archæological material previously existing only in MS. or in unique printed copies, was at the outset very restricted in its zone and its scope; but, in spite of the circumscribed interest felt by general readers in the more abstruse or obscure provinces of research, the movement, at first confined to scholars and patrons of literature, at length became universal in its range and distribution. There is no country pretending to culture without several of these institutions. In Great Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland, they have long abounded. They have rendered accessible an enormous body of inedited or unknown material for history, archæology, and biography; and after all deductions for indiscretion and dilettantism, they may be pronounced the medium for having shed new and precious light on well-nigh all branches of human science. To the book-collector they appeal less in a possessory sense than as works of reference. Where they enter into his plan is in the practice, which some of them have followed, of striking off on vellum or other special substance half a dozen copies, which from their presqu' uniquity (this is as good a phrase as rarissime) have ere now bred unchristian sentiments among competitors for the bijoux in the belles lettres. The book-hunter's motto is Pulchra quæ difficilia; he reverses the common saying.
There is so far no exhaustive Guide to the Club literature, but the supplementary volume to Bohn's Lowndes contains a fairly complete view of it down to 1869. The additions since that date have been incessant and almost innumerable. The British Museum General Catalogue registers them all under the mediæval heading of Academies.
It is right and necessary that the inexperienced collector should be put on his guard against the reprehensible and dishonest practice of some professional vendors in advertising or offering for disposal books of which the leaves are not entirely genuine, which are deficient in supplemental matter recognised as part of the work, or whose bindings are sophisticated in a manner only capable of detection by a connoisseur or a specialist. There are wily persons who systematically and habitually insert in their catalogues items which they have acquired with the distinct proviso that they were defective, and have naturally acquired at a proportionate price. The forms of deception are infinitely various; but the leading points demanding attention and verification are apt to be:—
